4 ms·

The FTDI OSX drivers will still randomly cause kernel panics when the device is unplugged and a program still holds an open file descriptor for the serial port.

by wrl 12y ago

The FTDI OSX drivers will still randomly cause kernel panics when the device is unplugged and a program still holds an open file descriptor for the serial port. While working with a company which was developing and selling products with FTDI chips in them, we made FTDI aware of this issue and attached many panic logs. It's been about 5 years and they've still yet to actually fix it.

tcas 12y ago
They luckily did fix this in a relatively recent version -- try updating your driver. Still crazy that it shipped in the first place like that. EDIT: just realized that I was thinking of the PL2303, which had a similar issue, not FTDI.
- wyager 12y ago
  The newest version I can find on their site says it's from 2012. Link?
  - tcas 12y ago
    Oops, was dealing with a similar issue with the Prolific 2303, which was dealt with by using a newer driver, I haven't run into the issue yet with FTDI (which I don't as much).
    - wyager 12y ago
      Bummer. The FTDI driver crashes my mac quite frequently.
- wrl 12y ago
  The funny thing is that we reported this sometime in 2009 (might have been 2010), they "fixed it" and released a new version, but the new version only crashed somewhat less often.
Ecco 12y ago
OS X ships with an FTDI driver since 10.9. I suspect this one is made by Apple. Maybe because of this kind of issues. Do you still have crashes on 10.9+?
- duskwuff 12y ago
  Unfortunately, the Apple driver exhibits the same issue. It also doesn't support the control lines on the FT232 (e.g, DSR/DTR, RTS/CTS).